Through India and Burmah with pen and brush

by A. Hugh Fisher

IN THE SHAN STATES: GUARD AND POLICEMAN.

The next morning I was calling again at the house of the moat, when I beheld the Sawbwa approaching through the grounds carrying a black umbrella and followed by a dozen men, walking slowly behind him. He was rather thin and small-limbed, had dark eyes, not Mongolian in type, and a small moustache over a delicate mouth with a small narrow chin. On his head was a yellow turban, which added a little to his short stature, and he wore a dress or gown over-all of black silk with woven black pattern, fine black silk rolled round his neck for about five inches up to the chin. Thin white trouser-ends showed beneath the gown over dark socks and patent leather dancing-pumps with black ribbons. Of jewellery he wore little, his chief ornament being a fine ruby in a gold finger-ring.

The Sawbwa shook hands delicately and said, "How do you do?" and chatted in good English for a few minutes. He explained that he was extremely busy with an important case at the Court and asked me to join him there. He is a busy man, whose position is by no means a sinecure involving the direction of the three Shan States of Mihung, Hsunhai and Mintoung, and all the magisterial work of the district.

The Court-House was a two-storeyed wooden building, with a veranda and a balcony opposite the gate of the palace compound on the other side of a white dusty road. In the Court-Room the Sawbwa sat on a rotary chair upon a raised platform, and an arm-chair was placed for me beside him. Sawche had now discarded the yellow turban and wore a piece of rose-coloured silk round his head in the ordinary Burmese fashion. Behind us hung a portrait in black and white of Queen Victoria, and in front, on the top of a wooden railing, was a red narrow box, two feet long, tied in the centre with crossed tapes and containing some sacred writings for oath administration. On the platform beside the Sawbwa's chair, upon a low, round stool of red lacquer ornamented with a gold pattern, were china cups and teapots.

A man stood in one of two small docks or railed enclosures, and a number of people with documents in their hands squatted upon the floor outside.

I could not understand any of the speaking, and after he had been talking quite a long time to the man in the railed enclosure, the Sawbwa turned to me and proposed in his soft voice that he should send someone to show me round his compound. The moated house I had called at previously was far from here within the town.

Conducted by one man who spoke a few words of English and followed by another who did not, I crossed the road and entered the compound through red gates. It was surrounded by tall wooden palings, ten or eleven feet high, which were roughly whitewashed, and in the centre of the road-front, with small doors in the hoarding at each side, were these large wooden gates with a little rude carving about the top of them. Within, upon a rough cylinder of red brick in the middle of a level space of poor coarse grass, flying a little white fork-shaped flag, a tall flagstaff was set in front of the palace, which is built of wood upon a raised platform of cement and stucco-covered bricks, five or six feet from the ground. It is partly old and in the centre is surmounted by a series of gables, one above another, with well-carved barge boards. In the middle of the front, as well as at the two ends of the building, a flight of steps with low side walls leads to the top of the cement platform, and the centre flight is closed below by a small green railing with a wicket gate. Within, through the outer square-cut wooden pillars, you can see the red round stucco columns of the hall of audience. Outside, from the centre of the roof, a tall, very narrow spire shoots up above and behind the gables, and the top of this is richly ornamented and gilded like the "hti" of a pagoda.

The residence of the chief queen, the Maha Devi, a Shan woman, adjoins the palace immediately behind. A girl stood on the veranda bending forward and combing out her long black hair, which fell to the ground, and behind her between two of the posts of the veranda hung a large piece of tapestry with figures worked upon it in gold thread. Further back among trees are the houses of the second, third and fourth queens, and two for the twenty-six wives of minor importance. Here they live from one year's end to another, very rarely leaving the compound, and dwelling, though without its austerity, in the same seclusion as that of a nunnery.

Whatever influence it has had upon his ideals, an Oxford education has not led the Sawbwa to adopt Western practice in his matrimonial relations; yet it is doubtful if the Cockney keeper of the railway refreshment-room would have so far discounted his sense of superiority to an Asiatic as to have envied him even such privileges as these.